


Survivor's Guilt

by Immanuel



Series: Inferno [5]
Category: Horus Heresy - Various Authors, Warhammer 40.000, Warhammer 40k (Novels) - Various Authors
Genre: Dropsite Massacre, Gen, Iron hands, Isstvan V, Knights Errant - Horus Heresy, Salamanders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-16
Updated: 2015-06-16
Packaged: 2018-04-04 17:09:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4145874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Immanuel/pseuds/Immanuel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Do the weak die, or do the weak survive at their brothers' expense?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Survivor's Guilt

THE AVENGING FIST fell. Another traitor’s head was obliterated in a flash of electric discharge. Kheres swung low, sweeping the legs from under the next traitor before ending him with a graviton blast from his combi-bolter as he lay writhing on the ground. The refractor field built into his Gorgon-pattern Terminator armour flashed with an impact to his off side. He turned with the swing, shattering his enemy’s plastron as the clenched fist head of his hammer met the palatine aquila.  
  He was breathing heavily, taking advantage of the moment of respite. Up ahead, he could see the form of his primarch, Ferrus Manus, as he cleared a path with nothing more than his bare, silvered hands.  
  Kheres raised his hammer in the air, shouting into the vox. “Stygar, to me! We need that plasma cannon up here.”  
  “Aye sergeant,” came the reply, followed by a blast of white hot energy slamming into a charging traitor. The resplendent purple of the Emperor’s Childen blackened, molten armour bubbling as it was split open by the ferocious heat, patches of flayed skin stretched across the armour reduced to cinders.  
  Stygar lumbered forward, the air around him rippling with heat-haze as the plasma cannon vented. He was flanked by Achlys and Eris, Nablek bringing up the rear. The squad pumped bolt shells into the Third Legion ranks in semi-automatic bursts between swings of their power axes, relentlessly striding forwards as the enhanced servo-musculature of their Terminator armour absorbed the recoil with ease.  
  “Avernii moves as one brothers!” Kheres roared, bringing the hammer down with such force that it flattened its target against the ground. “No man falls behind!”  
  “We’ll catch Geras yet, sergeant,” Eris quipped, craning his head to see the last squad member’s signature hook-clawed lightning claws arcing through the air deeper in the press of battle.  
  Squad Kheres pushed on, Stygar’s plasma blasts forming the tip of their spear thrust into the traitor lines. A blade speared into Kheres’ arm, luckily missing any vital components of the augmetic limb. Even the refractor field and layered armour of Gorgon-pattern Terminator plate was not full-proof. Nablek was not so lucky, a blast from one of the traitor’s abominable sonic contraptions turning his head into a shattered shell of blood and bone. That brought the squad’s casualties up to fifty percent since landing on the blighted plains of Isstvan V.  
  Geras saw his brother fall, cutting his way across the battlefield to reach the traitor, whose lipless mouth was wide with deranged laughter. Silver claws wrapped in incandescent power tore at the traitor, opening him from thigh to throat before culminating in tearing his jaw free to sail back into the Morlocks’ ranks.  
  “I told you we’d catch him,” Eris gasped, staggering forward to bury his axe in the chest of another of the sonic traitors preparing to unleash his weapon on Geras’ rear.  
Eris’ other hand was empty, clutched to his abdomen where his armour was ripped open. A glint of weak light betrayed the slick of blood, invisible on his black armour. A spear stabbed through the wound, erupting out of his back. He must have known the intervention was suicide, but had sold his life for Geras’ knowing his wound was a weakness the Morlocks could not afford in this battle.  
  Geras made sure the sacrifice was not in vain, severing the haft of the spear with one claw as he sank the other through the faceplate of its wielder. Only now able to see the traitor clearly, renewed fury carried Kheres forward. The traitor wore the Tartaros-pattern Terminator armour and Phoenician helm of the Phoenix Guard.  
  He met the next Phoenix Guard with a wild swing of the _Avenging Fist_ , easily turned aside by a flick of his enemy’s power spear. The next swing met the same fate, and the next. The momentum of each blow used against it with a precision that Kheres’ unwieldy weapon could not match. To his right, the rest of his squad were moving pat him, engaged in their own battles with the elite of the Emperor’s Children.  
  “Clumsy!” The traitor jibed as he stepped aside from a downward swing, stabbing his spear into Kheres’ flank.  
  “You die now, Valkirion,” Kheres shot back, recognising the voice.  
  Cornelius Valkirion caught the hammer at the apex of its swing, levering it down to the ground and locking it in place.  
  “How can you kill me, if you can’t even touch me?”  
  Kheres stepped into Valkirion’s guard, pumping bolt rounds into him. The traitor laughed as they glanced off his armour.  
  “Really, Kheres?”  
  The moment of indulgent arrogance cost him his life. Rather than take steps against the threat of the combi-bolter, he gloated. He was rewarded with a point-blank shot from the weapon’s graviton attachment as it finished recharging. Valkirion’s laughter halted abruptly as his lungs collapsed under the pressure of his imploding armour. His hearts burst, blood oozing out of every crevice in the crumpled ruin of filigreed purple plate.  
  It was then that he saw him.  
  It seemed that silence fell on the battlefield, though the battle continued unabated. Every sensation was distant, slow, as if submerged.  
  Fulgrim the Illuminator, Primarch of the Emperor’s Children, the Phoenician, bestrode the battlefield as though taking a stroll in a pleasure-garden. His cloak whipped in the wind behind him, disdaining the touch of Isstvan’s sands. The gilded panoply glittered in the light of muzzle flares and power fields, seeming to cast Fulgrim’s perfect features in a golden glow even as they were framed by the platinum locks of his hair. The beauty was ruined utterly by the glint of madness behind the violet of his eyes. He carried _Forgebreaker_ in his hands, the hammer that had once signified his bond of brotherhood with Ferrus Manus now intended to be the instrument of his doom.  
The keening whistle of an artillery shell pierced the unreal silence. Kheres looked up, saw the stray shell descending towards him. It was already too late.  
  “Incoming!” Geras yelled, sending the squad scrambling to get clear.  
  Their bulky Terminator plate made it impossible. The squad disappeared behind a wall of light, the explosion of the earthshaker round bleeding into the flash of refractor fields as it struck them. As it burst them.  
  Purest chance sent Kheres flying through the air as his brothers were consumed by fire. He landed hard, smashing a shallow crater in the scorched black earth. He groaned, lifting his head to take his bearings. His squad were reduced to burning ruins in the shattered husks of their armour. Residual flames from the blast licked at them, seeking out flesh amongst the iron.  
  “The enemy is beaten!” the voice of Ferrus Manus shouted across the vox. “See how they run from us! Now we push on, let none escape our vengeance!”  
  Kheres tried to rise, unable to do so on the ruin of twisted armour and mangled flesh that his right leg had become. His last sight was the Morlocks renewed their charge, driven by the sight of the arch-traitor Fulgrim, before he slipped in shame from the waking world.

The apothecary knelt next to the slumped form of the Morlock. His diagnostor helm surveyed the armour, finding no evidence of fatal trauma. He inserted the data feed from his wrist-mounted narthecium into the collar, rewarded with the steady blip of a pulse.  
  “Brother A’sharad,” another Legionary in the green of the Eighteenth Legion called from nearby. “A retreat means we keep moving.”  
  “He’s still alive, Yo’ash,” the apothecary replied. “Give me a hand.”  
  Yo’ash helped him lift the Morlock, the two of them carrying him as best they could across their shoulders. The Morlock’s one remaining leg dragged a groove behind them in the earth as they went, his hammer and combi-bolter bouncing off their plastrons. Whatever had left the Morlock a leg down in the path of the Salamanders’ retreat had melted his weapons into his bionic hands.  
  He spared a glance back at the Morlocks still forging onwards in ever dwindling numbers and reflected that, at battle’s end, this one might yet be counted amongst the fortunate.  
  They forged onwards, retreating to the dropsite where the second wave of Astartes were landing to reinforce the offensive against the traitors. The Morlock’s Terminator armour was heavy, leaving them towards the rear of the Salamanders forces. A’sharad could see the dropsite up ahead when the Morlock began to groan.  
  He tried to stand on his own as he regained his senses, sending A’sharad and Yo’ash stumbling. It seemed he had forgotten he had only one leg.  
  “Careful, cousin,” A’sharad warned, coming to a halt. “We’re almost there.”  
  Ahead of them was a ridge, on top of which Kheres saw a group of Legionaries. Legionaries wearing the lightning-marred armour of the Night Lords.  
  “No, no,” he growled. “We’re retreating. Why are we retreating?”  
  “Primarch’s orders,” Yo’ash explained. “This was the point of having a second wave. It was always the plan.”  
  “What of the Gorgon?”  
  Yo’ash hesitated.  
  “He refused to pull back. The Tenth are still advancing, heedless of the Vulkan and Corax’s words,” A’sharad cut in.  
  “We saw the Phoenician!” Kheres shouted. “Why do you abandon him? We must turn back, press the assault.”  
  “Let the second wave come to his aid,” Yo’ash said, seeking in vain to mollify the Morlock. “Our cousins deserve their share of the victory.”  
  Even as he spoke, a pulse of bright light erupted from the traitors’ fortifications behind them. In answer, the ridge ahead was lit with the muzzle flare of hundreds of bolters.  
  “Blood of Kesare,” Yo’ash cursed, swallowing his words as the Salamanders ahead of them fell in droves the treachery of the Night Lords.

Isstvan V, intended to be the traitors’ tomb, had become a charnel house monument to the extent of Horus’ betrayal. The dropsite was littered with the bodies of thousands of Astartes in green and black, murdered in the space of minutes. It was the single largest cull of space marines the galaxy had ever seen, but it was not total.  
  The bunker was filled with screams. Yo’ash stood in one corner, trying to block out the noise as he patched together a network of other survivors. In the confined space, in truth little more than a foxhole that had concealed a suicide squad of Death Guard to attack the first wave from behind, the echo of Keahai’s agony seemed loud enough to reach Horus himself.  
  A’sharad was hunched over the one-armed devastator, doing what he could for the extensive wounds to his head and torso caused by the explosion of his multimelta. A Salamander was used to burns. It was the poison coursing through his body from a comparatively insubstantial wound from a needle pistol that had him in fits of agony.  
  “There’s nothing you can do, Asa,” Keahai gasped in a rare moment of peace. It was those cruel moments that made the pain all the fiercer each time it returned.  
  “Don’t give up now,” A’sharad insisted. “Pain tempers the soul”  
  Keahai gave a weak smile. “Not this time,” he managed before the pain bit anew.  
  “He’s suffered enough, A’sharad,” N’dete spoke over the screams. “Give him the peace.”  
  A’sharad’s face was twisted with sorrow as he held Keahai’s head gently in one hand. The narthercium’s carnifex rested against his temple. He gritted his teeth, supressing the pain with a last reserve of willpower.  
  “Into the fires of battle,” he whispered.  
  “Unto the anvil of war,” A’asharad replied as the carnifex shot into Keahai’s brain.  
  N’dete turned back to Kheres.  
  “Try it.”  
  Kheres flexed the new leg, more a makeshift splint than a cybernetic. It was sluggish, but the servo-musculature managed to make it move. He stood gingerly, slowly putting his weight onto the scavenged lattice of power armour and scrap metal. It held.  
  “My thanks, cousin,” he grumbled, his anger omnidirectional at ally and traitor alike.  
  N’dete sighed, not bothering this time to remind Kheres that it would only have changed which traitors’ bolts reaped their lives if they had not retreated. He moved over to Keahai’s body, the silence left by his cries now filled with the screech of A’sharad’s reductor carving through Keahai’s rib-plate to reach the progenoid gland. N’dete knelt by his brother’s side, picking up his melta bomb and hanging it from his own belt.  
  Kheres limped over to Yo’ash, pointedly waiting to be filled in. Yo’ash turned to face him, removing his helmet. He matched Kheres’ gaze, but addressed the whole group.  
  “For all practical purposes, our forces have been wiped out. I have made contact with other small groups of survivors, in a similar situation to our own. Maybe seventy. Range is limited, and that count is only those with vox coverage, but we have to operate on the assumption that that is all that’s left.”  
  Shocked silence greeted him. They had all witnessed the massacre, but it left the horror of the reality undiminished.  
  “Escape is the only possible victory left to us. When Naru returns from his reconnaissance we can formulate a plan.”  
  “The primarchs?” Kheres’ voice had a dangerous edge to it.  
  Yo’ash pursed his lips, choosing his words carefully. “Vulkan was seen charging towards the Iron Warriors’ lines. There is no word of Corax. And Ferrus Manus,” his voice trailed off.  
  “No.”  
  “Ferrus Manus is dead.”  
  A black fist thundered into his jaw, knocking him back into the wall. He wiped away a trickle of blood as the other Salamanders restrained Kheres before he killed Yo’ash in his rage.  
  “I’m sorry,” he added.  
  He did not say that the Gorgon had met his end at Fulgrim’s hand. He didn’t need to.  
  A’sharad and N’dete released Kheres, letting him stagger away to smash his hammer into the wall, grief fuelling his rage.  
  Naru slid into the foxhole, panting for breath as he gathered himself. All eyes turned to him, and even Kheres was stilled.  
  “Anything to report?” Yo’ash asked.  
  “Storm Eagle just put down at the top of the ridge. Eighth Legion. Looks like it’s refuelling and reloading.”  
  “So close to the front lines?” N’dete’s question voiced the doubts in the others’ minds.  
  “What need have they to exercise prudence while we cower?” Kheres growled. “The Night Lords are used to massacring the helpless, and by our inaction we indulge them. We will teach them the error of their ways. Hit them hard and they will not stand before us. They have not the stomach for a real fight.”  
  Yo’ash contemplated the possibilities, looking from hesitant N’dete to eager Naru. Finally he looked to A’sharad, who nodded.  
  “We will have no better chance than this, Yo’ash,” the apothecary said.  
  Yo’ash donned his helmet. “This is Brother Yo’ash of the Hesiod Firedrakes,” he voxed. “There is a Storm Eagle on the ridge and I intend to capture it. I implore you all to join me, for whatever small chance of success we have. In Vulkan’s name.”  
  Kheres was already standing ready at the entrance. “Stay behind me as best you can,” he said, stepping out into hell.  
  He limped forwards with what speed he could muster, crushing the pain beneath fury. As they neared the ridge, the Night Lords spotted them and opened fire. Most bounced harmlessly off Kheres’ heavier plate, the Terminator forming an effective shield for the Salamanders behind him. A plasma blast scored a burn in his side, N’dete picking off the culprit with a perfect shot to the coils of the plasma cannon. The traitor was consumed by the birth of a miniature star in his hands.  
  As they advanced, other Astartes emerged from the surrounding area, responding to Yo’ash’s plea. Perhaps a century of Salamanders now charged up the ridge, the sudden appearance of resistance throwing the Night Lords into disarray. Those ahead of the charge scattered, moving to join the reinforcements coming from either side. The flanking forces would close behind the loyalists, no doubt hoping to cut them down without having to face them eye-to-eye.  
  That intention began to come to fruition, Salamanders falling at the edges of the charge as they were scythed down with hails of bolterfire. Some stopped to run and face the Night Lords, selling their lives to buy the others the time they needed.  
  Even if they were all to reach the end of the charge, the unspoken reality was that the Storm Eagle could carry perhaps thirty of them if pushed to the limit.  
  A piercing red beam shot out at Kheres, at least one Night Lord having the sense to focus heavier weapons on the lumbering form of the Terminator. The volkite beam glanced off the surface of his pauldron.  
  A cry rang out as A’sharad fell, body bursting into flames as the deflected beam punctured the seal of his armour beneath the helm. Deflagrating arcs of red light reached out from his burning form, claiming the lives of a handful of other Legionary’s unfortunate enough to stand too close.  
  Kheres reached the top of the ridge. All that stood between the eighty Salamanders at his back and the glimmer of hope represented by the Storm Eagle was a handful of devastators sheltering behind a wall of mutilated bodies erected in some macabre mockery of a defence line. Volkite beams converged on the silver gauntlet at his chest, but failed to wound him.  
  Suddenly the wall was in motion. Bodies of Astartes and humans both tumbled forwards, accompanied by body parts loosed from their host. In its place was a new wall. A wall of shields decorated with icons of death, both real and rendered in paint. A score of bolters opened fire on fully automatic, sending almost the entire front line falling to the ground at once. Kheres weathered the storm, but N’dete was laid low in the instant of his vindication. It was a trap.  
  “Onwards brothers!” Yo’ash shouted, slamming his last clip into his bolter.  
  The flanking Night Lords had closed ranks behind them, encircling the Salamanders in a killing ground.  
  It was the dropsite replicated in miniature. Salamanders fell in droves to enemy fire as they were caught unawares. Even when they did return fire, bolt and flame were turned by boarding shields with little effect. It seemed at least one commander in the Eighth Legion did have the courage to stand and fight.  
  But all was not yet lost. A shot from Kheres’ graviton attachment took one of the traitors down, opening up a gap in their lines. He enlarged the hole with a sweeping swing of his hammer, splitting a shield in two to punch into the chest of the traitor carrying it and knock him into the traitor at his side.  
  Salamanders rushed through the gap, forming a makeshift defensive line in front of the Storm Eagle and firing into the rear of the Night Lords breachers. Naru grabbed the melta bomb from N’dete’s belt and fixed it to the side door. Kheres reached the flyer as the front ramp descended, accompanied by the stab of lascannon beams into the traitor lines. Naru had reached the cockpit.  
  The cordon was broken, revealing the horrific scale of the slaughter. A mere handful of Salamanders remained in the killing ground, and none of them would reach the ship in time. Naru was already aboard, Yo’ash and six more Salamanders firing as they retreated up the ramp. Five more, as a bolt exploded behind a pierced eye-lense.  
  Kheres was about to step onto the ramp when he noticed movement in the mass of flesh pinned to the side of the Storm Eagle’s hull. It was an Astartes, flensed and hung up for the amusement of the traitors. And he was still alive.  
  Amidst the bloodstained flesh, Kheres saw extensive bionic augmentation. The right arm ended in the ragged wound of a chainblade, but the left ended in a clean, surgical stump. Where his left hand had been severed to make way for a new, iron, hand.  
  He groaned, blood seeping out of his mouth as he tried to speak.  
  “No!” the voice of Yo’ash came from the top of the ramp.  
  A brother had fallen at his side, but it was not at this that his cry was directed. Kheres followed the direction of his outstretched arm, seeing the last survivor on the ridge making his final stand.  
  Smoke was pouring from every seal and crack in his armour. The plates were glowing red, then white, hot. As his life ended, the psyker exploded into a raging inferno, incinerating a handful of the traitors closer to him.  
  Too much had already been sacrificed to balk at one more. The _Avenging Fist_ smashed the skull of the Iron Hand crucified on the side of the Storm Eagle and Kheres thumped up the ramp, his combi-bolter clicking dry as he fired a last burst into the disoriented traitors.  
  “I think you may have made a mistake,” the brute snarled as he strode forward, uncaring of the open ground he crossed. “That’s one of ours.”  
  He wore the midnight plate of the Eighth Legion, artificer-wrought to contain his giant frame. The enlarged armour afforded him the convenience of plentiful space from which to hang the grisly souvenirs of his work. His clawed, bloodstained gauntlets held the shaft of a great power axe. _Acerbus_. The Night Lords were rallying behind him. Kheres roared, taking a step back down the ramp.  
  “Raise the ramp!” Yo’ash shouted, running to hold the Morlock back.  
  Kheres moved as fast as he could, but it was not enough to overcome both the hindrance of his leg and the Salamander hanging on his gun-arm. Enraged, he slammed his thunder hammer into the hatch as it clanged shut.  
  On the other side, Acerbus saw the metal bow with the force of the hammer blow. He laughed, a corpse-sound devoid of true mirth, as the gunship’s engines roared. Turning his back as it took off into the sky, he returned to the slaughter.

Naru jinked sharply to evade the sporadic anti-air fire from the Night Lords. They seemed to have lost interest in favour of easier prey, and in the continuing chaos the unusual flight of the Storm Eagle went unnoticed. A red light blinked insistently at him from the display.  
  “We’re losing fuel!” he shouted back through the open cockpit door.  
  A Salamander hauled himself to his feet, mag-locking his boots against the turbulent flight. His armour marked him out as a sergeant. He dragged himself into the co-pilot’s seat. The corpse of its previous occupant slid across the floor behind him.  
  “A fuel line must have torn when we took off,” he offered.  
  “Rate is steady. We can make it to orbit, but we won’t make it fast,” Naru reduced the power to the engines as he levelled off their flight. “How many are we, sergeant?”  
  “I don’t think rank counts anymore,” he joked grimly. “Call me N’yira. There are four Salamanders and an Iron Hand.”  
  “I can’t believe the stubborn bastard actually left the ground,” Naru muttered.  
  “He almost didn’t,” Yo’ash said as he came to stand in the doorway. “How are things in the sky?”  
  “A slower version of what’s on the ground.”  
  “We won’t reach what’s left of our fleet,” N’yira put in, pulling up a series of flight vectors on the display. Yo’ash cursed. Suddenly, Naru’s eyes lit up. He pointed to a small Imperial Army frigate, hanging low compared to other ships and behind the frontline carnage of the more heavily armed Legion vessels.  
  “That could do it,” Yo’ash clapped him on the shoulder, smiling as he returned to the troop compartment. “Looks like we have one more fight on our hands before we can make our way to Terra.”  
  A Legionary in the artificer armour of a Firedrake moved towards Yo’ash.  
  “We won’t even make it aboard before they shoot us down.”  
  “An Eighth Legion Storm Eagle, battle damaged and leaking fuel,” Yo’ash replied. “I think they’ll let us land, Tu’bora.”

He had been right. After a massacre of their own, half a dozen Salamanders stood on the bridge of the stolen ship, drenched in the blood of those brave or foolish enough to oppose them. Most of the crew had quickly capitulated.  
  Kheres had returned to the hanger as soon as Yo’ash had accepted the crew’s surrender. Denied the chance to blunt his rage with genocide, he seemed little interested on what course of action they next pursued.  
  Yo’ash sat in the captain’s throne, dwarfing it with his bulk, flanked by Tu’bora and N’yira.  
  “Naru, set us on full burn to the Mandeville point,” he ordered, Naru relaying the order at gunpoint to the steersman. “Elgon, can we get an astropathic message through?”  
  “Not out of the system,” Elgon replied, combat knife resting menacingly on the shoulder of the mistress of communications.  
  “It seems we have need to go to Terra ourselves,” Tu’bora sighed.  
  “Aye, it does,” Yo’ash turned to the last of the Salamanders, looming over the displays for the gunnery decks. “Keep a finger on that trigger, B’soke. I doubt our passing will be noticed in the madness, but-”  
  “We’ll go down fighting if it is.”

The body was fastened to the fuselage by a set of butcher’s hooks. Kheres held his dead brother in one hand, using the other to bend each viciously barbed hook open. His hands were damaged where they had been cut free from his weapons, their movements jerky and crude, but he would have no other undertake this task. He and his dead brother were alone in the hanger.  
  He twisted the last hook free, allowing his brother’s body to slip into his arms. Blood trickled from the hook-wounds, too few Larraman cells left to form a seal. The blood was thin, mixing with the melting sheen of void-formed ice that had formed as a new skin over his dead brother. He lifted the body onto his shoulders and began the slow march to the apothecarion.  
  No-one crossed his path as he went. The Salamanders were content to leave him with his grief, careful of stirring his dormant rage.  
  The mortuary slabs were too small for the frame of an Astartes Legionary. He lay the body across two of them. He picked up a cloth and began wiping away the blood. The body became no less red, the exposed musculature a constant reminder of the tortuous ordeal his brother had been put through. _If only he had less flesh_.  
  It was a hateful sight to behold, what had been done to this Legionary of the Iron Tenth. Most of all, it was the missing left hand, the stolen iron hand. By taking that, they had taken his act of honour to the primarch. _The dead primarch_.  
  In a flash of rage, he took hold of his own left hand and tore it free. The headless space above the stump of his brother’s neck seemed to mock him with its emptiness. He cut into his brother’s left arm, making a gap into which he could wedge his iron hand. It was a poor imitation of what had once been, but it would have to do.  
  He drew a sheet over the body before making his way to the armoury. Here, he set up a forge and, gathering what materiel he could find, began to beat the metal into armour. With a single hand, it was no easy task.  
  The echoes of his work resounded around the ship, accompanied with shouts of rage and anguish. He did not pause in his labour, locked away in the dark for days that became weeks, moulding the metal to his will with fury and fire.  
  At last, he had finished a suit of armour. Another crude imitation, but since his brother was robbed of a skin, he would be laid to rest in a skin of metal. The helm at least silenced the infernal void where his brother’s face should be.  
  “You are whole again, brother,” Kheres whispered.  
  Sorrow and rage were mingled in his eyes. It was not the Medusan custom to mourn the dead, for death was nothing more or less than the inevitable consequence of weakness. _Ferrus Manus is dead_. Did that make Ferrus Manus weak?  
  Kheres stood, both hands on the pommel of the Avenging Fist as its head rested on the floor, in silent vigil over his fallen brother. As he stood he meditated on all that had been. He would not move again until they reached the Sol system.

The ship was waylaid as soon as it entered the system. The cradle of humanity was on high alert, and none would reach even the dwarf-world of Pluto without the permission of ever-vigilant sentinels.  
  The ship did not resist, killing her engines and awaiting judgment.

Yo’ash stood unhelmed to receive Captain Aleph of the Imperial Fists. With him stood his five brothers. For all he knew they might be the last surviving Salamanders in the galaxy.  
  Aleph strode out of the Caestus Assault Ram at the head of a column of yellow-armoured space marines of the Seventh Legion. The captain removed his helm, crowned with the golden laurels of command. Beneath, silver eyes stared out of a noble face, sweeping the hanger for any hint of treachery.  
  His blue cloak curled around him as he came to a halt before Yo’ash. Ember-red eyes looked back at him from a face as black as coal.  
  “Hail, Captain Aleph,” Yo’ash greeted the captain with a slight incline of his head.  
  “This is all?”  
  “There is one other, Sergeant Kheres of the Tenth Legion. He is in the apothecarion.”  
  “Wounded?”  
  “Body and mind,” Yo’ash sighed. “He can walk, if that is what you wished to know. He stands there watching over the body of one of his fallen brothers.”  
  Aleph nodded, strong jaw set in a grimace as he acknowledged that. He gestured to the Caestus.  
  “Go. I will find him.”

He found Kheres just as he had been told he would. Aleph circled the joined slabs, surveying the false power armour wrapping the body on it with interest. He stopped at Kheres’ shoulder.  
  “Time to go, sergeant.”  
  Kheres’ eyes lifted from his fallen brother to meet the captain’s gaze. “What place is there left for me in this galaxy? Ferrus Manus is dead.”  
  “I know. It is because you are here that I know,” Aleph’s voice was stern, but with the encouragement of an officer reprimanding his men because he knows they can do better. “We need to know everything that happened. Then we can fight back.”  
  “Where am I to go, then?”  
  “To Titan,” Aleph replied, placing a hand on his shoulder to turn him to the door.  
  Kheres took three paces, then stiffened, looking back at his brother’s body.  
  “What would you have us do with him?” Aleph asked.  
  “I wish to bring him with me. When this madness is over, I will return him to Medusa. He will be a monument to all the brothers lost on Isstvan V.”  
  Aleph nodded, smiling sadly. “A worthy end.”

After the Caestus returned to its mothership, the stolen ship hung lifelessly in the void. It had brought its cargo to Sol, and now its work was done. The Imperial Fists’ vessel fired a salvo of torpedoes that ripped it apart.

Kheres opened his eyes to blinding light. His vision blurred with the starkness of it for a moment before his occulobe adjusted. The room was all sterile white and brushed steel. An apothecarion. He lay on a surgical slab, unarmoured and unclothed. At the foot stood a Legionary in grey plate of a Mark he did not recognise. It was unmarked by rank or insignia, but featured a golden eagle with wings spread across the plastron, another rising as if taking flight from behind the collar.  
  Adrenaline flooded his system as he recognised Nathaniel Garro, Battle-Captain of the Death Guard traitor Legion. He tried to rise, but found himself shackled. Worse, he remembered his augmetic limbs had been removed, leaving him without legs, a right arm or a left hand. He collapsed back in shock.  
  “Worry not,” Garro reassured him. “Your limbs will be replaced. They were severely damaged.”  
  “Traitor,” Kheres spat. “You led us into a trap!”  
  “That was not my intention,” Garro sighed, walking around the slab to stand at Kheres’ shoulder. “I had no idea how far the treachery had spread. All I knew was what had happened at Isstvan III.”  
  “You killed my father!” Kheres roared, struggling violently against his bonds. Were it not for the depth of rage in his eyes, it would have made a comical sight.  
  “I was hoping we might be able to have a more civilised conversation. Perhaps I shall return when you are whole.”  
  Kheres heard the click of a vox bead and saw Garro’s throat pulsing as he sub-vocalised an order. It was soon followed by the pneumatic hiss of a door opening behind him and the metallic clang of armoured footfalls. Another Legionary walked into view at Garro’s shoulder, a pair of servo-arms rearing above his head from the harness at his back. His armour, like Garro’s, was unadorned.  
  “You may be more comfortable with Voitek,” Garro turned to Ares Voitek. “Fix him as best you can, Ares.”  
  Kheres became still, allowing Voitek’s servo-arms to go to work on his broken body.  
  Garro paused on the threshold as he made to leave. “I do hope you reconsider, sergeant.”  
  The door hissed closed behind him, the sound swallowed by the whirring and clicking of Voitek’s servo-harness.  
  “Voitek. That’s a Medusan name,” Kheres remarked.  
  “It is.”  
  “You don’t wear the black.”  
  “I was an Iron Father of the Tenth Legion,” Voitek explained. “Now I am one of the Sigillite’s Knights Errant.”  
  “How can you serve under the son of Mortarion?” Kheres asked, incredulity and rage vying for supremacy in his tone.  
  “He set aside his Legion, the same as I did. The same as you will. I do what is necessary for the Emperor, for the Imperium, and for the Great Iron Father,” Voitek paused, observing Kheres stiffen at the mention of the primarch. “You wonder why you survived, yet he did not.”  
  “He was strong. I am weak.”  
  “The flesh is weak, Kheres,” Voitek corrected him. “I can give you the strength of the machine, but you must put aside the weakness in your mind if you are to wield it. Embrace the purity of hate.”  
  “Hate? Is that all we have left now, Frater?”  
  A moment of silence passed between them before Voitek answered. “That’s all there is.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is a narrative rendition of a player's character bio from a Horus Heresy RPG I GMed. Kheres is Fresher's brain-child.
> 
> Timeline:  
> 006.M31: Dropsite Massacre  
> c.007.M31: Survivors of Isstvan V return to Sol


End file.
